Bonnouji

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Mangakas of the romance genre often try to spice up their plots by putting their main couple through many dramatic obstacles in their relationships like third party involvement or family affairs, dragging the readers along for a roller coaster ride of heartaches.

Bonnouji has none of this. Nothing really happens. The best way to summarize this is that 2 apartment-mates meet and fall in love. And yet it manages to capture your attention from page 1 all the way to the very end.

Relationships don't need to be spiced up and dramatized. Bonnouji zeroes in on the comedy arising from the awkwardness and trickiness of 2 people ... falling in love. It reminds us that at the end of it all, love is about companionship, and it is wonderful.

It's a simple read with simple art to match. But don't make the mistake of thinking it lacks depth. Get ready for lots of cringes and chuckles, and loads of warm fuzzy feels. It's truly a manga that'll put a smile on your face :)

So while looking for alcohol related manga’s like Bartender, a random person on a chat introduced me to Bonnouji. This may not have been about alcohol but I still fell in love with it. It’s a very simple story about a man and woman falling in love. There is nothing really over the top, no harems for Oyamada to pick from, no really large conflicts or supernatural intervention. After all the anime and manga I have read over the years, I was surprised this was actually a manga (don’t you love sarcasm?).

The characters are very simple, and sadly sometimes a little to simple. Ozawa ... is rather spacey at times and doesn’t really grow at all though the story. She just goes through her life as a normal business woman, responsible and hard working while trying to get up in the world, but when she is in Bonnouji (Oyamada’s room) she acts like a child. Half the time I didn’t even believe she was almost 30 with how childish she was. Oyamada really wasn’t any better, being carefree pretty much. He would always have fun opening one box after another from the items his brother would send him and living each day as though there was going to be something spectacular in the next box. These two worlds have really different feelings to them, and yet they seem to collide in odd ways as the two get more and more attracted to each other. One would even think, maybe, that Ozawa is only using Zenji to get out of her daily routine and to help her forget her ex. That is a big question to ask and it is one of the main reasons I kept reading the manga, not because of the artwork, but because of the story inside. That to me is the real reason people should be reading manga in the first place.

What bugged me was the fact that there was no good way to judge time at all. The chapters held themselves together well with the stories and playful antics but there was no way to figure out time. They would say it every once in a while that a year has passed, that a couple months passed but it doesn’t tell you out loud. It’s only a small hint.

The art style is pretty sloppy, sort of a mash together of lines but I think it sort of works. What doesn’t work though is how strange the proportions sometimes end up, with squashed heads and large hips at some points. They don’t even look like adults half the time because of the inconsistent way the characters had been drawn. I thought for a while they might have been just teens at a couple points, especially Oyamada. There is a bit of a warning I have to add to this by the way, there are a couple sex scenes (though they are not made to be the main focus) and many mature talks about romance. This is not for younger people. The background goes from highly detailed to almost nothing a lot of the time though I wonder if that is just time frames getting in the way.

This was worth every moment of me reading it and I think everyone needs to at least try to read it at some point if they love romance.

I first thought it would be funny to read because the art was horrific.
After getting into it, I started liking the storyline, the characters, and I kept updated with it.

It's very cute and light hearted. The characters/ love interests are realistic and mature and the little things that happen between them are fun to read about. The two characters are pretty relatable. I still like it even though the art is horrible.